How costly have sprint mistakes been in Bagnaia’s MotoGP title bid

Francesco Bagnaia’s hopes of retaining the MotoGP title are hanging by a thread. The factory Ducati rider is facing a 24-point deficit to Pramac rival Jorge Martin heading into the final round of the season in Barcelona next week.

Although the odds have been against Bagnaia for some time, it was his crash from second place in the Malaysian Grand Prix sprint that has effectively sealed the deal in Martin’s favour.

From the early part of the year, Bagnaia had identified sprint races as being the main weakness in his title bid. After the first six rounds, he had accumulated just 14 points on Saturdays while his chief rival Martin had tallied up 56. By this stage, Bagnaia had actually outscored Martin by three points in Sunday races, but was left with a mammoth 39-point gap to overcome in the overall table.

To be fair to Bagnaia, he has upped his performance in half-distance races in the ensuing period. Since the Italian Grand Prix back in June, Bagnaia has picked up six sprint wins in 13 attempts, compared to four for Martin. Over the course of the full year, Martin is still ahead in the reckoning with seven wins to six thanks to his early-season form but clearly, the defending champion has shown that he can be rapid in the new format.

However, while Bagnaia knows how to score big on any given day, he has also hemorrhaged big points to the championship leader over the course of the season.

As early as the second round in Portugal, the two-time champion gave away a sprint win by outbraking himself at Turn 1 while leading the race. He later revealed that a mistake in miscalculating the impact of decreasing fuel load on braking led to him running off track.

A DNF in the Le Mans sprint was partly down to him, as the crash in qualifying left his primary bike with too much damage. The back-up GP24 that he ended up racing was described by him as “dangerous”, forcing him to pull into the pits after just three laps.

Then there was the biggest error of all in Barcelona, where he crashed on the final lap while circulating a second clear of his nearest rival.

Even with that patchy run in the first part of the season, Bagnaia had managed to pull himself to the top of the championship, incidentally after Martin dumped his bike while leading the German Grand Prix.

But when the championship resumed at Silverstone in early August after the summer break, Bagnaia failed to capitalise on the situation, hitting the deck in the sprint while having a podium in the bag.

That weekend clearly showed the 27-year-old’s tendency to make errors at the worst time possible. The 10-point lead he had inherited after Sachsenring was turned into a three-point deficit and the focus suddenly shifted to Martin’s mental strength in overturning a psychological and sporting disadvantage.

In that context, it is easy to explain why Bagnaia fumbled under pressure in Malaysia at Turn 9 – admittedly at one of the trickiest corners on the track, a complex uphill left-hander that comes at the end of a fairly long straight.

The retirement from Sepang marked his fourth non-score in a sprint event this year (compared to two for Martin). That goes to show why he has lost a whopping 48 points to his title rival on Saturdays alone.

Points scored by Martin and Bagnaia in sprints:

Of course, Bagnaia then responded with a bang on Sunday, outduelling Martin in the early stages of the grand prix before sprinting clear to win by 3.1s.

It was his 10th win of the year from 19 grands prix, which already puts his 2024 campaign as one of the best by any rider in the history of the premier class.

With that success, he is now tied with ex-Ducati and Honda star Casey Stoner in the list of riders with most wins in a season, albeit with a lower success ratio due to there being more races on the calendar now.

Francesco Bagnaia, Ducati Team

Photo by: Gold and Goose / Motorsport Images

Another triumph in the Barcelona finale would mean he would have scored as many victories as Valentino Rossi did in 2001, ‘02 and ‘05, but again with the same caveat as before with Stoner.

In fact, 11 victories was the maximum motorcycling legend Giacomo Agostini achieved in his career in a single season – in 1972, back when there were just 13 races in the 500cc class.

Points scored by Martin and Bagnaia in grands prix

With those numbers, it would be easy to conclude that Bagnaia would have been champion if MotoGP had not overhauled its weekend format and added sprint races to the schedule. After all, if you take sprints out of the equation, it would be Bagnaia leading the championship by 24 points heading to Barelona and not Martin.

But that only explains part of the picture. Bagnaia is known to build his speed over the course of a weekend. He starts off slowly on Friday and gradually picks up the pace, making steady gains in both single-lap performance and long run speed.

A crucial part of that trajectory is the sprint, which gives him the opportunity to hone his speed in real-life racing conditions. It’s one of the reasons why he is able to win races on Sundays after being outperformed by Martin in the sprints.

Of course, it’s important to note that some of his dismal sprint results in sprints haven’t entirely been of his own making. At Jerez, for example, he was blameless when he scored a duck after being sandwiched by Brad Binder and Marco Bezzecchi. He also strongly hinted at a faulty Michelin tyre for his troubled run to ninth place in the Aragon sprint, a race in which Martin finished on the podium.

But those misses pale in comparison to the unforced errors committed by Bagnaia and it’s a key reason why he may have to surrender the crown to Martin in a little over a week’s time.